Ever wanted to be in charge? Well, in my own little world I will be, one day. Just not quite yet. I'm a bit tired at the moment... maybe I'll take over after I've had my little nap.
The United Dingdom - stating the bleeding obvious so you don't have to.
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Thursday, 20 October 2016

Wakey wakey!

The new Westworld, adapted from Michael Crichton’s 1969
book, is shaping up to be a must-watch. I only hope they don’t try and drag it
into a second season with the resulting disappointment that invariably brings.
I won’t be a spoiler, if you haven’t started watching it, but the fundamental
plot twist is really rather clever. Of course, none of it is real; we willingly
suspend our critical faculties to accept this other reality for the duration of
the show before returning to our regular lives.

It is a mark of maturity when you can happily accept the
alternative world of a summer sci-fi blockbuster, but then slip without the
slightest hiccup back into ‘normal’ mode as you leave the cinema. When you are
an impressionable child, however, relinquishing your immersion in the other
world is harder. And in these days of heavily merchandised movies, kids can be
seen parading in costume for days after a viewing, reliving their fantasies. We’ve
always had fancy dress but now ‘cosplay’ affords supposed adults the same
indulgences.

All very harmless, you may say, as you watch the parade
of steampunks and hipsters and goths and others, all living in their own little
imaginary universes, but is it? Our new age injunctions not to judge others frees
some people to never grow up. All very Peter Pan, but if a great problem of our
days is an ageing population, do we really want to encourage, at the other end,
an extended childhood, a form of mirror senility, where people of voting age
are disinclined to separate fact from fancy and take longer to become fully
engaged members of a serious society?

I watched an Adam Curtis documentary the other day,
called Hyper-normalisation, in which it suggests that the complexities of the
world are deliberately boiled down, by government and the media, to easily digestible
tales of goodies and baddies and how “we
have retreated into a simplified and often completely fake version of the world”. Curtis suggests
that one could become “...so much a part
of the system that you were unable to see beyond it.” with your hopes and
dreams indistinguishable from the state such as under Soviet Russia and the
regimes of the Middle East dictators.

The dream we have always wanted to inhabit, in the
enlightened west, is one of freedom and peace and prosperity, with individual
responsibility and tolerance thrown in for good measure. And to a large extent
this is what we had. “Mustn’t grumble!” was our cheery watchword, as we
accepted the reality of our situations and the fragility of our contentment.
Things will turn out fine, you’ll see, we told ourselves and generally got on
with it.

So when did people start taking fictions so seriously?
There is a narrative of harm at large. Rationally tolerant people have been browbeaten
into tolerating anything and everything in the name of diversity and
multiculturalism, no matter how ridiculous or harmful it seems and whole
sections of society now believe the fairy stories they tell each other. Take
this idiot piece in the Guardian, that bastion of self-harming illiberalism, in
which it is argued that Brexit has turned Britain from tolerance to bigotry. Can’t
you almost see the self-congratulating, non-critical dupes all getting together
for group hugs and general agreement?

It used to be a hallmark of the British that we had an
ironic, dry, satirical sense of humour. Self-deprecating; what’s the matter
mate, can’t you take a joke? Coupled with a healthy pull-the-other-one scepticism
we were armoured against the ludicrous and able to laugh at ourselves. So, in
an effort to return to the sanity of the real world I suggest we take back
control by taking the piss. Instead of pandering to them, mock your children;
they’ll thank you for it one day.